Gannett News Service November 27, 2006
Troops struggle with Iraq's evolving violence
By John Yaukey
As President Bush and his strategists consider potentially major changes in Iraq, experts say, they face the increasingly vexing challenge of violence that is splintering into different conflicts, some at the neighborhood level.
That was driven home in gory detail Thursday with a series of bombings and mortar attacks in a Baghdad slum that killed about 150 civilians in one of the deadliest days in Iraq since the war began more than three years ago.
“What worries me most now is the disorganized violence,” said John Pike, a military analyst with GlobalSecurity.org, a widely cited defense Web site. “You have these revenge killings and crime that is simply beyond what any army is able to fix. There is no political solution to that.”
So where does this leave the U.S. mission in Iraq as what had been primarily a political conflict dissolves down to the tribal level? For some of the war’s leading critics, this means the campaign has been lost and it’s time to get out.
Top American generals and officials have said they have six months or so to get a handle on the sectarian killings and other crimes before the Iraq campaign becomes unsalvageable.
“The longer this goes on ... the more the violence devolves down to the neighborhood level,” CIA director Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden recently told lawmakers. “The center disappears, and normal people ... end up acting like extremists.”
Bush will travel to Jordan at the end of the month to meet with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki for talks on the latest developments in Iraq.
Meanwhile, three major efforts are under way to formulate new policy options on Iraq while Democrats have been rallying behind plans for gradual troop withdrawals as a way of prodding Iraq’s stalled government into action.
The policy efforts include the independent Iraq Study Group, led by former Republican Secretary of State James Baker and former Democratic Indiana Rep. Lee Hamilton; a Pentagon council led by Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and a White House analysis of the latest assessments of Iraq from the intelligence agencies.
All of this is likely to come to fruition in early to mid-December as the Senate takes up the nomination of former CIA chief Robert Gates to replace outgoing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, widely criticized for his management of the Iraq war.
Indeed, the coming weeks will see some major reflection on the situation in Iraq at the highest levels. But it’s an open question as to how substantially Bush is willing to change his policy of ensuring Iraq can run and protect itself before starting to withdraw U.S. troops.
“I think the president has felt the political winds,” said Susan Rice, an assistant secretary of state during the Clinton administration and a national security analyst at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “I am not entirely convinced that he is substantively of a different mind.”
Looting to death squads
Iraq’s descent into chaos seemed to always move a step ahead of U.S. tactics and strategy.
It began with simple looting after the fall of Baghdad more than three years ago. Then came the guerrilla attacks that grew into a full-blown insurgency.
When the violence spiked, ethnic militias filled the security vacuum. Inevitably, these gangs began fighting each other for territory and have attained considerable political power in the process.
Recent months have seen some of the Iranian-backed Shiite militias splinter into death squads, carrying out especially brutal reprisal killings. That has been accompanied by a rise in vicious neighborhood crime.
Now, “no single narrative is sufficient to explain all the violence in Iraq today,” Hayden said.
The sectarian violence now ripping apart Baghdad has gotten so bad it has surpassed the insurgency as the leading threat in Iraq, according to top generals.
The United Nations recently reported that 3,709 Iraqi civilians were killed in October, the highest total since the war began in March 2003 and another sign that the violence is still moving in the wrong direction.
Some Republicans, leading conservatives and retired generals with service in Iraq have been calling for an increase of U.S. troops in Iraq by 20,000 or more. The U.S. troop presence already has been creeping up from 138,000 more than half a year ago to almost 150,000 now with 2,000 more Marines soon to deploy in restive Anbar province.
Training Iraqis
Army Gen. John Abizaid, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, has rejected the idea of major U.S. troop increases, claiming the Iraqis must secure their own country.
“We want the Iraqis to do more,” Abizaid recently told lawmakers. “They will win the insurgency. They will solve the sectarian violence with our help.”
Iraq’s insurgency is likely to go on for years and ultimately will have to be won by the Iraqi army.
But getting the sectarian killings and street violence under control will require Iraq’s police forces to improve performance, and the outlook recently hasn’t been encouraging, according to top officials.
Army Lt. Gen. Michael Maples, chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told lawmakers that the Iraqi police force and its leaders in the Interior Ministry are “heavily infiltrated” by sectarian gangs and Iraq’s Shiite militias “often operate under the protection or approval of Iraqi police.”
Basic competence is also a problem.
Abizaid recently testified that two out of 27 Iraqi police battalions were capable of taking the lead in law enforcement operations, down from six a month ago.
© Copyright 2006, Gannett News Service
